So, like I've said elsewhere, I'm in college for a television broadcasting program and lots of editing/tech skills I learned through AMVs give me an advantage in some areas. I've been using Premiere since 2001, After Effects since 2004, and I was doing Tape-To-Tape music videos with Weird Al and the Simpsons in like 1998. I've got some experience What's so weird is, most of my classmates are fresh out of high school and thusly they all started using Adobe CS5 Master Edition, well, in September 2011.
Firstly, the school gives us a free copy of Adobe CS5 Master Edition. I mean, the whole thing, the key works on as many computers as you want and they gave us seperate Mac and PC keys. First time I've ever LIGIT owned an Adobe program other than Acrobat Reader. Fuck yeah. So, they give us serials and are told that the school library has several CS5 ME DVDs that you can check out to use as install media. At no time does the professor inform the students that they can just download Adobe software from Adobe, enter their key, and bam.
"Guys, we can just download the programs from Adobe and use the keys they gave us."
"No, I don't want to download anything, I'm not pirating it when they give it to us for free! I'll get mine from the library."
"I... I don't think you understand..."
And then there's all the interesting video things that they don't quite understand.
"I made my project, but now Premiere says everything is 'Offline'."
"Where are the files you put into them?"
"I moved them from my desktop to the trash can when I was done editing. But I saved the project, so I don't know what's wrong."
"I tried to upload a 500MB file to YouTube, and it broke my Mac's HDD, now it won't start and I lost all my files. I HATE YOUTUBE!"
"What's the difference between a composite and a component signal?"
"Composite is the crappy one, the yellow RCA one, that uses one signal and you should avoid using it for anything."
"But that's how I hooked my Xbox up to my 47" high def and it looks GREAT."
"The DSLR's files are all .MOVs, that means they won't work on your PC. You need a DSLR that makes .AVI files."
"Is this video 16:9 or 4:3? This is 16:9 right?"
"Yeah, that's 16:9"
(It was 4:3)
"That HDTV over there, is it 16:9 or 4:3?"
(I have great difficulty understanding how people can't quickly visually discern the difference between the two aspect ratios.)
We have a digital video server in our live studio, it's basically some complicated Linux based thing that can stream up to three 16:9 SD channels into our studio system. So, ya know, it's the thingy that plays clips into the mixer. It's kinda finicky about file formats, as you'd expect an embedded type media device to be. 720x480, DV Stream (Not DV AVI) or MPEG-2 only. It's also even MORE picky when it comes to color spaces, frame rates, ect. We were given a very specific preset for Adobe Premiere to export MPEG-2 4:2:2 video correctly for the server system. The thing is, while they copied each setting, no one understands what each setting means, so if they make any deviations they can't figure out what wen't wrong. The most common issue is, the prof never specified the aspect ratio setting, so most of the class have theirs set to 4:3, while trying to export 16:9 projects into a 16:9 television system. The system doesn't care about the AR flags in the stream, everything will be played to fit the 16:9 frame anyway. But Premiere DOES, so when Premiere things it's exporting 16:9 into a 4:3 export, it letter boxes it, squishing the video, and then it gets distorted when played back in the system. The result during playback is something that looks closer to 2.39:1. Also, when this happens, one of my classmates says 'It's 1080p?' He somehow thinks that that odd, stretched aspect ratio in a standard def system is '1080p'...
Additionally, sometimes people will just use ANY MPEG-2 preset in Premiere and hope it works. Any resolution other than 720x480 or 704x480 causes the box to crash and leaves students confused as to why.
"Why did you format your external HDD to ExFAT instead of FAT32 like the professor said so?"
"So I can use large files and have the drive interact with Mac or PC without issue."
"You should have done it like the professor said. ....Hey! Why can't I put this 14GB file onto my hard drive!? It says there's not enough room but there's 800GB free!"
(This one is paraphrased, I admit it)
"I hate copying files, the quality is always lower."
"No, when you copy a file on a computer, it makes an exact 1:1 copy. There's no loss unless a horrible error occurs."
"Don't tell me that crap. I don't think you know how computers work as well as you think you do."
"...Guh..."
"I downloaded this video through YouTube, then used it in my After Effects project, exported as MOV h.264, to import it into Premiere, then exported it as MPEG-2. Why does it look like crap though?"
"Yeah, but stuff we download from Google Image Search isn't copyrighted, right?"
(SOMEONE ACTUALLY ASKED THAT, WORD FOR WORD, AND HE WAS SO CONFIDENT THAT HE WAS CORRECT. D:)
Maybe I sound elitest in this, and I'm not really. I remember my own technological numbskullery with this stuff. Honest to god, I think once in IRC, in 2004, I said to Zarx "WTF IS A KEY FRAME?" as he tried to help me with AE. Maybe it was Pwolf I asked, but anyway, the superstitions that many of them see to have with their Mac Book Pros is just so odd.











